* * * * *

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the battle now going on
among the trades unions between the spirited labourers and the tired
ones, and among the manufacturers between the inspired employers and the
mechanical-minded ones.

For the time being, at least, it is the inspired employers who have most
power to change the conditions of labour and to free the
mechanical-minded slaves. It is they who are standing to-day on the
great strategical ground of our time. They hold the pass of human life.
People cannot expect to be inspired in crowds. Crowds are too unwieldy
and too inconvenient to act quickly. The people can only concentrate
their energies on getting and demanding inspired employers, on
insisting that the men who for eight or nine hours a day are pouring in
with their wages their thoughts, and their motives, the very hope with
which they live, into their lives, shall be the champions of the people,
shall represent them and act for them, as they are not placed to act for
themselves, and with more imagination than they can yet expect to have
for themselves. If our labouring men of to-day are going to struggle out
from under the machines, they can only do it by doing all that they can
in labour unions and in the press and at the polls to keep the machines
in this world out of the hands of tired and mechanical-minded owners.

But probably the more immediate rescue from the evil or mechanicalness
in machines is not going to come from the employers on the one hand or
the employees on the other, but from having the employees in the Trades
Unions and the employers in the directors' meetings combining together
to keep in subordinate places where they cannot hurt others all men,
whether directors or employees, who do not work harder than they have